Bumper Stickers for the Children’s Workforce
By Ned Younger
Having launched the Centre for the Children’s Workforce earlier this year, we’ve put a lot of energy into developing the thinking around a more joined-up workforce for children, and the programmes of work that might support it.
Through that work, I’ve found some of the phrases and ideas we’ve come across to be resonant, and useful to share in explaining our thinking and the development of the Centre itself. I’ve been thinking of them as bumper stickers for the children’s workforce.
I’ve shared some version of these phrases at a couple of events and sessions over the last 6 months, including at the launch of the Foundation Degree and with the Trust CPD Leaders Network, and wanted to share them here and reflect on why we’ve found them valuable.
1. “Great schools are necessary but not sufficient”
If there was only one, it might be this. It will be immediately familiar to anyone who knows the Reach Foundation and its Cradle to Career work, and it’s been central to our thinking over the past year developing the Centre.
Even without that connection to Reach, who incubated and now host the Centre, the phrase reflects that you can have a deep belief in the power of education and schools, and also recognise that children’s lives are bigger than any one institution.
For us, it speaks to an ambition to build approaches to working with babies, children and young people which recognise the value of systems which connect up professionals in the context of children’s lives. And it makes the case for the collective responsibility for developing those approaches beyond organisational boundaries.
The Foundation Degree is in part a response to that. By bringing together practitioners from across the children's workforce, and helping them build networks rooted in their communities, we're trying to grow the connective tissue that the system currently lacks.
2. “The children’s workforce is hiding in plain sight”
Our colleague Sam Fitzpatrick shared this one in an interview with Schools Week back in October. Quite apart from being a lovely phrase, we think it speaks to the opportunity we’re organising around with the Centre.
For us, “hiding in plain sight” suggests that there is a powerful children’s workforce that already exists within communities, institutions and services, even if the ‘children’s workforce’ framing isn’t currently common. Everyone knows someone who stitches things together for children and families in a community, even if that role is underrecognised, or undervalued.
It also reflects that this workforce is currently less than the sum of its parts: professions are trained, regulated, and organised separately; we value them differently; and people aren’t routinely supported to make their best possible contribution between and across services and systems.
If that's right, the workforce becomes a significant and under-recognised lever for change, and the question becomes a practical one: who in that workforce is hiding in plain sight, and what would be unlocked by taking their development seriously?
3. “A common body of knowledge”
Partly because one of our starting points for this work has been an intentionally multi-disciplinary Foundation Degree, one of the core questions for us has been what is the foundational knowledge anyone working with babies, children, and young people would benefit from being able to draw on?
The phrase "a common body of knowledge" was written on a post-it at the first focus group I attended when I joined what would become the Centre, and has been a consistent reference point ever since. It remains unattributed, but our Director of Education Beck shared it in her piece on the Foundation Degree curriculum, and has done the most thinking around it.
One of the things I’ve taken from Beck’s piece is that articulating and organising around a common body of knowledge offers scope to codify the knowledge that many practitioners only learn through experience.
Some of that knowledge is what you might expect: safeguarding, child development, legal frameworks. But it also includes the impact of generational trauma, the significance of rites of passage, the complex interplay of background, gender and race on a child's identity and outcomes.
We’re not claiming any particular right to the definitive articulation of this body of knowledge, and we also know that it will have to evolve over time to remain fit for purpose. But we do think that offering something that is intentionally cross-cutting and ambitious is a vital part of our work.
4. “Shared accountability, differentiated responsibility”
Another banger, this one is from Mei Lim, who led the development of the Reach Foundation’s initial Early Years Foundation Degree, and who spoke with Julie Fossey (Ted Wragg Institute) and Leora Cruddas (The Confederation of School Trusts) as part of a panel at our launch event earlier this year.
She shared it as a principle from the place-based collective impact work she’s been part of in Feltham through the Feltham Convening Partnership. They’ve seen a need for a shared commitment and language, but also space for specialism and distinct roles.
The phrase speaks to one of the tensions that I think has been most interesting to me in looking into the history of the children’s workforce as a policy agenda. It is also one that Leora spoke to on both the panel at the event and also an earlier blog post for us.
In that piece Leora reflected, with reference to the Children’s Workforce Development Council, that previous attempts at coherence had not always sufficiently honoured domain expertise; the deep professional knowledge and responsibilities that different sectors hold.
As Leora shared, bringing professionals together must be done “with a deep respect for the professional expertise and the knowledge that they hold”. Which I take to mean building collaborative infrastructure that connects distinct domains while maintaining the expertise that gives each its integrity and value.
5. “Place is our last and best frontier”
Much in keeping with its increasing salience in social change work, the importance of place has never been far from the surface in our work so far.
The place-based model of the Reach Foundation’s the Early Years Foundation Degree in Feltham was absolutely central to both its viability and its impact. Most participants would not have done it if they’d had to leave their communities to go to University, and engaged because the learning was rooted locally, after work, alongside family life, embedded in their daily practice.
The result of this was not only individual growth and stronger organisations, but also cross-community networks that remained active beyond the programme, and relationships woven more tightly across the local system.
At the launch event, Leora tied that to the wider Trust movement, describing her vision of Multi-Academy Trusts, alongside NHS trusts and universities, as fundamentally civic anchor institutions.
She argued that if we take that idea seriously, leadership cannot be confined to organisational performance, but instead must be exercised consciously and intentionally across systems. She repeated a phrase she’s used before and which I think is evocative: “place is our last and best frontier”.
As we build up to the first year of the Foundation Degree, working with a network of founding delivery centres around the country, the opportunity is to work with a national footprint, but in a fundamentally place-based way.
Building the Convoy
So there you have it, the first 5 bumper stickers for the children’s workforce convoy:
Great schools are necessary but not sufficient
The children’s workforce is hiding in plain sight
A common body of knowledge
Shared accountability, differentiated responsibility
Place is our last and best frontier
We’ll keep adding to this collection, and would be so interested in what peers and fellow travellers across these systems would add. Let me know! We can build a convoy.
Meanwhile: Honk For a More Coherent Workforce